Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Paul Costello

Anti-Revisionist Communism in the United States, 1945-1950

First Published:Theoretical Review No. 11, July-August 1979, pps. 10-17Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba and D. WaltersCopyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.

The Roots Of Browderism

An adequate understanding of the anti-revisionist struggles of
1945-1950 is impossible without a preliminary understanding of Browderism, against
which these struggles developed. It is sometimes thought that Browderism was an
entirely American deviation, limited in space and time. This perspective fails
to grasp the historical continuity of revisionism in Marxist history and the
common roots of revisionism as an international phenomenon in the Communist
movement (something we will discuss in a moment).

But first, we should also note the timeliness of the critique of Browderism
because of Browderism’s basic affinity with two contemporary phenomena – the
present line of the Communist Party, USA (which is its direct descendent), and
Euro-Communism. Both the CPUSA and the Euro-Communists share essential elements
of Browderism – a contempt for theory, class collaborationist practice, and the
liquidation of the party’s vanguard role. To criticize Browderism is, thus, no
mere academic exercise; it is a starting point for understanding contemporary
American and world revisionism.

Lenin, in his speeches and writings on the international Communist movement
[1], insisted upon the importance of the development of
Marxist theory and tactics in accordance with the specific features of each
country. To this, we can add that revisionism, like Marxism, develops its own
specific features in response to the peculiar nature of the social formation and
the class struggle in the country in which it arises.

Browderism was a specific form of revisionism, the complexity of which
prevents us from discussing it fully here.[2] We can only mention its abandonment of
revolutionary theory, its liquidation of democratic centralism, and its practice
of economism and reformism. We must go a little deeper, however, if we are to
grasp Browderism’s fundamental political error, the error that led it to
dissolve the Communist Party in 1944.

Browderism was a revisionism that arose in the United States, but its origins
can be traced back to the line of the Communist International adopted at its
Seventh World Congress in 1935. Marx and Lenin maintained that all forms of
bourgeois state power were forms of class power, that is, even though the actual
state machinery is in the hands of only one fraction of the bourgeoisie, that
fraction rules for the class as a whole. In this way, the bourgeoisie, divided
by economic competition and diversity, is given political cohesion through its
exercise of state power.

Lenin, noting the secondary character of difference within the ruling class,
argued that, while Communists were duty bound to exploit these differences, they
also had to always maintain and develop proletarian independence in relation to
other classes and were required to continually emphasize the contradictory and
tentative character of any coincidence of interests between the working class
and sections of the bourgeoisie.

The Seventh Comintern Congress opened the door to revisionism on this
question by defining fascism not as a form of class power but as the
dictatorship of a section of the bourgeoisie: the most reactionary elements of
finance capital. Avoiding the fact that this section was able to rule only
through the consent of the rest of the class, the Comintern produced a new
strategy, the popular front, which posited a long-term strategic alliance
between the working class, other classes and even sections of the bourgeoisie,
all united against that other section of the ruling class – pro-fascist finance
capital.

The line of the popular front tended to obscure the fundamentally similar
class interests of different sections of the bourgeoisie, while at the same time
it blurred the fundamentally different class interests of the various forces in
the anti-fascist struggle. It turned a temporary tactical coincidence of
anti-fascist goals, shared by the working class and sections of the bourgeoisie,
into a long-term strategy to which proletarian independence was sacrificed. By
thus abandoning a political line based on class analysis in the interests of
“anti-fascist” unity, the popular front strategy fostered illusions among the
masses as to the character and class motives of the bourgeoisie, and abandoned
proletarian independence in favor of courting bourgeois allies.

Browderism was only the further development of this line in the context of
allied cooperation in the final years of the Second World War. In the light of
the allied agreement worked out at Teheran in December 1943 between Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin, Browder insisted that the “national unity front” necessary
to defeat fascism and insure international cooperation in the postwar world had
to be broadened to include not just sections of the bourgeoisie, but even
important sections of finance capital as well [3]

In the process, Browder made explicit what had already been implicit in the
popular front strategy: class struggle was no longer as important as class
collaboration. Speaking of the need for Communists to change their attitudes
toward class struggle and finance capital in the light of the Teheran coalition,
Browder stated:

“If J. P. Morgan supports this coalition and goes down the line for it, I as a
Communist am prepared to clasp his hand on that and join with him to realize it.
Class divisions or political groupings have no significance now except as they
reflect one side or the other of this issue.” [4]

Browder decided not to wait to see how J. P. Morgan would act; it was up to
the Communists to make the first move. To show their commitment to national
unity, he proposed that Communists dissolve their party and establish in its
place a non-partisan political association. This was accomplished at a
convention held on May 20-22, 1944. [5]

In this move, Browder had the support of the overwhelming majority of the
party leadership and the bulk of the membership. The only members of the Party’s
National Committee to express opposition to Browder’s proposals when they were
first announced were Samuel Adams Darcy, who was head of the Communist Party in
Eastern Pennsylvania and William Z. Foster.

But even this opposition did not go to the heart of Browder’s revisionism,
only its extent. Foster, for example, supported the call for “the broadest
national unity,” including “all of the capitalist elements who will loyally
support the program.” He simply was opposed to the idea that “the main body of
finance capital is now or can be incorporated into the national unity necessary
to carry out the decisions of the Teheran Conference in a democratic and
progressive spirit.” [6]

At the national committee meetings where they aired their views, Darcy and
Foster met with a unanimous opposition. Foster thereupon decided to be silent
and go along with the new line. Only Darcy felt strongly enough about his
position to continue the fight. His reward? Expulsion from the Party (now called
the Communist Political Association) in June 1944. Ironically enough, Darcy’s
chief accuser and the head of the commission that decided upon his expulsion was
none other than William Z. Foster.

The following series of events is generally well-known. Having been
established in May 1944, the Communist Political Association was assailed, a
year later, in May 1945, when an article written by the French Communist Jacques
Duclos criticizing Browder appeared in the Daily Worker. Translated from the
April issue of the French Party’s theoretical journal, the article characterized
Browder’s views as “a notorious revision of Marxism.”

Although Browder himself refused to back down, soon all his former allies in
the leadership deserted him. In July 1945, the Communist Party was reconstituted
at a special convention and in February 1946 Browder was expelled, together with
a few close associates.

The Campaign Against The Left: A Chronology

Those Communists who expected that the reconstitution of the party would lead
to an energetic campaign against Browderism and a clean sweep of the old Browder
leadership were disappointed. The new national secretariat and the majority of
the national board of the reconstituted party consisted of individuals who had
been officers of the Communist Political Association and loyal followers of
Browder (with the exception of Foster).

More ominous were two other developments that seemed to indicate that the
real campaign would not be against the right but rather against the left. In
Foster’s speech to the special convention restoring the party, he warned against
those guilty of “leftism,” those who wanted to “drop the slogan of national
unity.” [7] At the same convention, the only member
of the Communist Political Association national committee who demanded that
Browder’s leading supporters accept some of the responsibility for the Party’s
revisionism, Samuel Donchin, from Philadelphia, was disciplined and denied a
place on the new national committee.

Among the cynical, the angry and the confused that belonged to or supported
the party, a special phrase was coined to describe the new leadership and its
policies: Browderism without Browder. One of the first shots to be fired against
“Browderism without Browder” cam from an unexpected place – Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada – in the form of a book, Communism versus Opportunism, written by Fergus
McKean.

Fergus McKean had joined the Communist Party of Canada in 1932. In 1935, he
became Vancouver Provincial Secretary of the Party. However, in August 1945, he
resigned his membership in protest against what he felt was the continuation of
an essentially revisionist line. Shortly thereafter, he founded a dissident
Communist group and published his book, which, in addition to castigating
Canadian opportunism, had a lengthy section on Browderism in the CPUSA.

McKean went much further than Foster in his critique of Browderism. While the
CPUSA continued to speak in support of a “Roosevelt, labor, democratic
coalition,” McKean called for “a policy of class struggle, free from all
elements of class collaboration or dependence upon the bourgeoisie.” [8]

McKean was not alone in his views. Scarcely a month after Browder himself was
expelled, on March 15, 1946, a group calling itself the New Committee for
Publications (NCP) was established in New York. Originally a study group, its
stated purpose was “to bring about the establishment of a real
Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist party in the United States.” [9]

Meeting on a weekly basis for discussions and reports, the NCP was headed by
Lyle Dowling, who had previously been managing editor of the Brooklyn Eagle
newspaper. Sam Darcy was active in the NCP initially, as were many who found
themselves expelled from the Communist Party for leftism. On October 28, 1946,
the New Committee for Publications began the production of a weekly mimeographed
bulletin, the NCP Report.

The Communist Party leadership was not unaware of the left opposition and in
the fall of 1946 began to move against it. Among the first expelled were two
prominent writers and editors of the New Masses, Ruth McKenney and Bruce Minton,
who had spoken out against the inadequacies of the anti-Browder campaign as
early as August 1945. While McKenney and Minton belonged to the party
organization in Connecticut, the bulk of the expelled members were either to
come from California or New York.

While in New York most of the expulsions were of rank and file members, in
California, important party leaders supported the left opposition. These
included Vern Smith, a charter member of the CPUSA and for eight years
successively labor editor and foreign editor of the California Party paper, the
Daily People’s World.

Smith and seventeen others, including Walter Lambert, the former state trade
union secretary, were expelled in September 1946. In fact, an entire party
industrial branch was dissolved when it refused to break with “leftism.” These
expulsions occurred in San Francisco where the Party leadership had sought to
break a machinist strike. When the machinist branch of the party refused to
support this policy, it was liquidated. [10]

Also expelled in California was Harrison George. Like Vern Smith, he was a
founding member of the party, and like Smith he had previously been a leader of
the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.). George had helped to found the
Daily Worker in 1924 and for over eight years was editor-in-chief of the Daily
People’s World. After his expulsion, George wrote and published a book, The
Crisis in the CPUSA.[11]

Another prominent member of the Party, expelled in September 1946, was
William F. Dunne. Dunne, who had been a founding member of the Party and active
in its trade union work had been a co-editor of the Daily Worker from 1924 to
1927. Troubled by bouts with alcoholism, Dunne had been removed from leadership
positions in the Browder period and sent to work in the National Maritime Union.
Dunne was at sea when the party was dissolved and reconstituted, but he took up
the fight against Foster from the “left” as soon as he returned to the States.
After his expulsion, he organized one of several dissident Communist groups in
the National Maritime Union and published a pamphlet, The Struggle Against
Opportunism in the Labor Movement, For A Socialist United States[12]

The expulsions by no means affected only prominent figures. In the Bronx, the
section committee demanded the expulsion of Earl Price, the leader of a Party
youth club, the P.R. Club (named after Paul Robeson), after he criticized the
failure to carry through a genuine campaign against Browderism. When the
majority of the club rallied to Price’s defense, half the club, including its
executive committee, was expelled.[13] Reconstituting itself as the P.R.
Club, Communist Party (Expelled), in April it began publication of a monthly
bulletin entitled Spark.

In San Diego, two party clubs were suspended from membership by the state
leadership. In New York, a group of expelled Communists was formed in Queens
around Bert Sutta, an expelled section organizer. Another group calling itself
the Bill Haywood Club (Expelled) was formed in Brooklyn around Francis Franklin,
a party historian and writer on the Black National question.

Other expelled groups were also established in the New York area, in Los
Angeles, in Seattle, and in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Moreover, many
individuals were expelled who did not join an expelled group, while a number of
expelled groups kept in touch with left oppositionists who remained Party
members.

As with the new Communist movement in its infancy, the multiplication of
organizations gave rise to a situation in which many groups spent more time
polemicising against each other than in any other kind of activity. Also like
the new Communist movement, the lack of advanced theory and a correct general
political line prevented these groups from working together and establishing any
kind of principled unity.

Everywhere the expelled movement attempted to organize itself and issue
propaganda directed both toward other expelled forces and toward those remaining
in the CPUSA. In addition to the NCP and its NCP Report, and the P.R. Club
(Expelled) and Spark, there was the San Francisco Committee for Correspondence,
which published the S.F.C.C. Bulletin, and the Los Angeles Committee for
Correspondence, which printed L.A. Notes. Also, there was the New York Maritime
Committee for a Communist Party with its Fore ’N Aft, Francis Franklins’ group,
which published Toward Socialism, and a group in Chapel Hill, which published
The Road Ahead. For a short time, a group of trade unionists that adhered to the
left opposition while remaining in the Party published a bulletin entitled
Vanguard.

Those who didn’t issue periodicals wrote pamphlets. Harrison George wrote a
supplement to his The Crisis in the CPUSA and a short piece on “The Party.” Burt
Sutta published The Fight Against Revisionism in the U.S. Communist Party in
March 1947. In July, he wrote The ’Spark’ and the Fight for a Revolutionary
Party. In 1948, Sutta also published a number of articles in the collection
Correspondence with Homer Mulligan.

The proliferation of organizations of expelled Communists around the country
raised the issue of some form of national unity for the left opposition. In the
summer of 1947, an effort was made to unite the major groups. The Los Angeles
Committee for Correspondence issued a call for a common national publication and
a meeting of all the New York groups was held. Both of these efforts fell
through due to basic differences on a number of issues (which will be discussed
later on).

Unity efforts were renewed in June 1948 in anticipation of the forthcoming
14th Convention of the CPUSA, slated for August. It was proposed that all the
expelled groups unite on a common program to be distributed to the party
membership before the convention. Nothing came of this effort nationally, again
because of fundamental differences, but in New York, three groups, the P.R. Club
(Expelled), the Maritime Committee for a Communist Party, and the trade union
group which published the Vanguard united to issue the first number of a new
publication, Turning Point (although by the second issue the Trade Union group
had withdrawn).[14]

The Lines And Practice Of The Expelled Movement

The failure of all efforts at unification demonstrates the tremendous
sectarianism that dominated the anti-revisionist forces in this period. In the
beginning, the NCP sought to reprint and distribute the works of many other
expelled groups and individuals. But the line of the NCP and Dowling’s own
slander and suspicion of others soon isolated the NCP from all but the Los
Angeles Committee for Correspondence.

For a while, the supporters of Harrison George and Francis Franklin worked
together, but were unable to draw in other groups. In fact, each grouping tended
to raise its own particular line to the level of principle and made acceptance
of their line the condition upon which it would work with others.

Accompanying this sectarianism was a spy scare that was equally damaging to
the expelled forces. Dowling was quick to charge anyone who disagreed with him
with being a spy for the CP leadership within the expelled movement. Harrison
George responded with the charge that Dowling himself was a spy, even suggesting
to the Turning Point group that they enlist a “tail” to shadow Dowling and
report on his activities. [15]

This sectarian infighting and the spy scare which followed it not only
reduced the capacity of the expelled movement to present a clear line in
opposition to the CPUSA, but it also reduced the appeal of the anti-revisionist
forces to those within and without the Party who wanted to fight for a genuine
Marxist-Leninist line.

A number of problems of organization and tactics divided the expelled
movement, not the least of which concerned the question of which was the correct
road forward for the anti-revisionist movement.

The expelled movement was united in its assessment that the CPUSA leadership
had not broken with Browderite revisionism nor had it taken up the political
line and practice necessary for the rectification of previous errors. All agreed
that the Party continued to practice class collaboration instead of class
struggle, that it was capitulating to the Democratic Party in its political
practice and the trade union bureaucracy tied to capital in its work in the
labor movement.

In this regard, the left opposition wrote a number of important articles
detailing the economist and reformist line that the CPUSA was pursuing in the
CIO. The expelled movement correctly identified the Party’s acceptance and
support for the CIO resolution, adopted in 1946, which rejected “Communist
interference” in the CIO in the interests of “unity” and an inexcusable
capitulation to red-baiting and anti-Communist hysteria.

The events which followed – the wholesale destruction of the trade union left,
and the CPUSA’s inability to mount an effective fightback were identified as the
fruits of the CP’s long standing policy of making deals with bureaucrats, rather
than building a base in the rank and file. The left demonstrated that the
Party’s “left-center coalitions” were, in reality, nothing more than the left
tailing after the center forces.

Finally, the expelled movement’s critique zeroed in on the central weakness
of the Party’s work – its refusal to fight for socialism, to make the issue of
socialism, in addition to the fight to day-to-day economic gains, an integral
part of its trade union activity.

In spite of this common framework, major differences arose as soon as the
question of how to fight back against revisionism was raised. The NCP considered
the formation of a new Communist Party to be a top priority, but argued that it
could be formed directly out of the existing expelled movement. Further, it
rejected any work in the CPUSA as futile and divisive and treated anyone who was
not yet willing to leave the Party) with disdain.

The Turning Point group agreed with the need to lay the basis for a new
party, but saw it as a long process of hard work and propaganda. Considering the
expelled movement far too small to constitute a new party and rejecting what it
saw as dogmatism and left sectarianism in much of the expelled movement, Turning
Point insisted that the majority of the Party rank and file could not be written
off. It proposed a two-fold approach of building the expelled movement, while at
the same time maintaining close ties and organizing within the Party rank and
file.

These two approaches were in sharp contrast to that of much of the rest of
the expelled movement, which placed its hopes not in the formation of a new
party but in the rectification of the old one. Expelled groups in San Diego and
Seattle, for instances, compared the call for a new party to dual unionism and
insisted that in any country there could be only one Communist party. The
Harrison George-Francis Franklin groups also rejected any talk of a new
Communist party, and particularly any talk of factional work among the CPUSA
rank and file. Franklin, for example, wrote: “I think it very important that we
do not seek to justify factionalism in seeking to organize revolt against the
present leadership, for the simple reason that our aim is to restore democratic
centralism, which cannot tolerate factionalism.” [16]

By way of reply, Turning Point pointed out the contradiction between
insisting that the CPUSA was not a Communist, democratic centralist party while
at the same time insisting that genuine Communists should not violate the
Party’s “democratic centralism.”

This “anti-factionalism” approach makes no sense unless it is understood in
the context of the expelled movement’s conception of the world Communist
movement, and its excessive reliance on external authority. After all, Browder
was removed as a result of the intervention of foreign parties. With the
formation of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in November 1947, the
expelled movement was sure that it was only a matter of time before it would
once again intervene, depose Foster and put them in power.

To insure their place in the next leadership, however, George felt the need
to avoid any appearance of splitting or factionalism that might alienate the
Communist Information Bureau. Rejecting Turning Point’s call for a new Communist
party, George let the cat out of the bag: "The Cominform will understand any
yielding to the ’new party’ slogan as a growth of anarchism in the Left Wing,
and a failure to observe Leninist principles of Party organization." [17]

George and his supporters were willing to sacrifice a genuine struggle within
the CPUSA to the hope that the Cominform would elevate him to leadership as a
reward for his good behavior. Turning Point, on the contrary, while dedicated to
all out struggle in the CPUSA, did not shrink from sending open letters to the
Communist Information Bureau and even Stalin himself requesting their
intervention in the U.S. Communist movement.

This practice strikingly foreshadowed the scramble of each group in the new
Communist movement to win approval from first China and now Albania as their
favored organization. Thinking that the prestige attached to having Chinese (or
Albanian) support would be a ticket to success, these groups have sacrificed the
long-term interests of the U.S. working class in having its own party to
securing the patronage of a foreign party. In so doing, they have continued a
long and dubious tradition in American Marxism.

These efforts were predicated on the proposition that the rest of the world
Communist movement was healthy, while only the CPUSA was revisionist. The only
expelled leader who openly challenged this view was Burt Sutta. In his
Correspondence with Homer Mulligan, Sutta made a number of criticisms of the
world Communist movement that anticipated certain elements of the current debate
on the international line of our movement today. [18]

Sutta first targeted Stalin’s statements in favor of peaceful coexistence in
the post-war world as an abandonment of proletarian internationalism. Likewise,
he criticized the nationalism of the Cominform in calling upon European
Communists to “put themselves at the head of the truly national, truly patriotic
forces” as also violating proletarian internationalism.[19]

In this respect, Sutta was far ahead of his time and the rest of the expelled
movement. He was equally astute in his critique of the expelled movement for its
indifference to theory. Sutta divided the left opposition into two wings, the
“actionists” and the “theoreticians.”

The “actionists,” according to Sutta, considered that both the party’s policy
and the line of the world Communist movement were generally correct, only the
practice of the CPUSA was deficient. This tendency, said Sutta, simply wanted to
restore the same militant activity of the "good old days." The “theoreticians,”
on the other hand, traced the failure of the party to its general line. Sutta
wrote:

“They contend that this current bankrupt policy has its roots in the policy of
the ’good old days.’ In the eyes of this group, it is necessary to reexamine the
whole theory on which the activities of the Communist Party are based. This
means going back to the classics of Marxism and testing them with real life to
prove their validity. The position taken by the theoreticians is that without
this, no amount of real struggle is worth anything. You cannot take a trip if
you do not know where you are going and you cannot organize struggles correctly
unless there is a correct line.– [20]

Unfortunately, Sutta refused to work with anyone who rejected his views and
his opposition to the Soviet Union and the Communist Information Bureau was
immediately labeled “Trotskyism” by the rest of the expelled movement for whom
any criticism of the world Communist movement was anathema.

If the expelled movement demonstrated a pronounced sectarianism in its
dealings with each other and with forces still within the Party, its political
practice was characterized by an ultra-left disregard for the contemporary
political situation and the ideological state of the working class. This is most
apparent in the approach taken by the left opposition to the Progressive Party
movement of Henry Wallace and the 1948 elections.

The NCP, William F. Dunne and Harrison George were united in their opposition
to any support or work on behalf of the Progressive Party. NCP displayed its
leftism by insisting that there were only two futures for the American working
class – socialism or fascism. Since Wallace did not represent the former, any
work on his behalf would only mislead the workers and divert attention from the
formation of a genuine Communist party.

George, too, opposed the Progressive Party, for its pacifist ideology and its
political impotence. Clinging to pre-conceived notions, he insisted that a
genuine third party would only result from the federation of various
organizations including a Communist party.

Only the Turning Point group among the expelled forces openly fought for
Communist intervention in the Progressive Party. Arguing that the masses of
American workers were not yet socialist minded, at a moment which required the
broadest unity against fascism and the war danger, Turning Point called for an
“anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, non-red-baiting third party” in which
Communists would play a strong and independent role. [21]

Although conscious of the limitations of the Henry Wallace movement, Turning
Point was similarly conscious that isolation from the motion of the advanced
sections of the working class would be suicidal for the anti-revisionist
Communist movement. Unfortunately, however, left sectarianism was not defeated
and the weak and divided multitude of expelled groups was overwhelmed by the
onrush of events that produced the Cold War and McCarthyism.

Epilogue

In June 1948, the Communist Information Bureau issued its first communiqué
against Titoism and Yugoslavia. In July, the FBI under the Smith Act arrested
twelve top leaders of the Communist Party. In November, Truman won reelection
while smashing the Third Party dreams of the progressives whose candidate, Henry
Wallace, received only a little more than one million votes instead of the
expected ten to fifteen million.

The trial of Communist party leaders began in January 1949. The Party was
presented with a choice: either resolutely defend the Marxist-Leninist strategy
of proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat and face the
consequences, or adopt a new peaceful legalist line on the transition to
socialism, downplay Marxism-Leninism and hope to ride out the storm. The Party
leadership, William Z. Foster and Eugene Dennis in particular, quickly decided
on the second alternative.

Since the Smith Act forbade the advocacy of overthrowing the government by
force and violence, the Communist Party’s legal strategy was to deny that the
law applied to the Party inasmuch as it advocated only a peaceful parliamentary
path to socialism. Party witnesses repeated this theme on the stand; party
leaders repeated it in the press and to the mass media. It was written into
Foster’s history of the Party and embodied in the 1954 party program. On the
witness stand, the defense quoted a 1941 pamphlet written by Foster at the
height of Browder’s influence which read: “Charges that the Communists advocate
violence in this transition from capitalism to socialism are not true.... The
masses, once having decided upon establishing socialism, will Inevitably turn to
the ways of peace and democracy to achieve the legitimate purpose.” [22]

And, the defense concluded, Foster in 1949 continued to subscribe
“completely” to this view Thus, In its efforts to defend itself, the party was
reduced to merely defending the Browderite revisionism it had claimed to
repudiate four ye previously. At the same time that it was defending Browderism,
the party went Browder on step further – it officially adopted the line peaceful
transition to socialism in the United States. But this was all to no avail. In
October the party leaders were convicted and sentenced three to five years in
prison. That same month the CIO met in convention and expelled the left led
unions, a decision that intensified the retreat of Communists at all levels in the
labor movement.

Understandably, this offensive against the left in general and the Communist
Party in particular created an unfavorable situation for Communist work. The
CPUSA was hit hard, but the tiny left opposition found the new conditions fatally
harsh. Under the pressures, the expelled organizations began to break up. The
North Carolina group embraced Titoism. Others felt the need to come to the aide
of the Communist Part now under attack. One was Francis Franklin who, in October
1949, announced in the last issue of Toward Socialism that his group was
dissolving, returning to the ranks of the CPUSA.

By 1950, the organized left outside the CP had all but disappeared. Only the
Turning Point group, which renamed itself the Communist League in 1954,
remained, publishing faithfully, if irregularly, Turning Point throughout the
Fifties giving up only in 1962 on the eve of the emergence of the New Communist
Movement. The Communist League continued its activity throughout these years,
defending the Rosenbergs, criticizing Khrushchev's attacks on Stalin, supporting
the Chinese and Albanian critiques of Soviet Revisionism, and always repeating
the call for a genuine Communist party in the United States.

Few activists in the anti-revisionist struggles of the late 1940’s (other
than the Communist League) politically survived the Cold War years. When the
Provisional Organizing Committee (POC) was formed in 1958, the Communist League
approached it. However, the POC rebuffed them with the epithet of “Stalinist.”
Perhaps one reason for POC’s reluctance to work with these veteran
anti-revisionists is the in that two of the principal New York Party leader who
directed the expulsion of the left in 1946, Isadore Begin and Al Lannon, were
themselves expelled from the party as leftists with the POC in 1958. [23]

Conclusions

The multitude of small groups and individuals who constituted the
anti-revisionist Communist movement in the late 1940’s differed in their basic
goals and methods. Some sought to reform the Communist Party, USA, others
attempted to create a new revolutionary Communist party. Neither goal was
realized. As we have noted, unfavorable objective conditions contributed to this
result, but the character of the expelled movement itself also had much to do
with it. Given the many striking similarities between the movement of the
1945-1950 period and the new Communist movement of our own day, it is useful to
sum up some of the principal errors made in the post-war period.

Dependence on a Foreign Power. Given the long history of U.S. Communists
relying on the Soviet Union for theoretical and political guidance, it is not
surprising that the majority of the anti-revisionist forces continued this
tradition. Unable to conceive of the possibility of building a U.S. Communist
movement on our own theoretical-political efforts, the anti-revisionists looked
to the Soviets and the Cominform to install themselves to replace Foster, just
as Foster had replaced Browder.

Then, as now, this policy puts off indefinitely the task of advancing the
theory and politics appropriate and necessary for Communist revolution in the
specific conditions of the U.S. social formation, and reproduces the
backwardness and dependence typical of a politically immature and isolated
movement.

Dogmatism. The vast bulk of U.S. Communists in the post-war period had been
trained in the Marxism-Leninism of the Stalin period. This statement is also
true of the bulk of the anti-revisionist forces. Such Marxism, rigid and
lifeless, capable only of justifying practice after the fact but not of giving
it clear, scientific direction, went unchallenged by the anti-revisionist
movement. Even though the anti-revisionists consciously sought out new
approaches to the political problems they faced, no sound political line or
alternative to the Communist Party emerged from this effort because the expelled
movement was lacking the theoretical tools with which to forge such necessary
revolutionary politics.

The failure of the post-war anti-revisionist movement, like the failure of
the contemporary dogmatist parties, flows directly from the crisis of Marxism of
which they were both a product. The difference is that, today, no one can ignore
the signs that the crisis is upon us, what with China’s invasion of Vietnam,
Euro-Communism and Hoxha’s polemics against Mao. An even more important
difference is that today the elements for a theoretical break with the Soviet
Marxism of the 1930’s are being produced and made available for our movement to
put them to use in the solution of our pressing political problems.

Sectarianism. The majority of the expelled groups elevated the struggle to
see their own particular line dominate the rest of the movement over any other
consideration. This in-fighting dissipated much of the energy of the
anti-revisionists while driving away interested potential supporters within and
without the Communist Party. Many groups considered themselves to have a fully
developed correct general line and rejected compromise on fundamental points. In
so doing, they placed their own narrow group interest above the interests of the
movement as a whole.

Then, as now, sectarianism is a tremendous obstacle to Communist unity. In
periods like the late 1940’s and the present, when the Communist movement is
divided into small local groups, sectarianism and localism feed each other,
rendering a national perspective difficult to achieve and, to some groups,
inherently suspect. The struggle against sectarianism requires not just a
commitment to national unity but the theoretical and political practice that
will make principled Communist unity possible.

Ultra-Leftism. Conjuncturally, the anti-revisionist movement of the post-war
period could not have appeared at a more inopportune moment. The entire
character of the working class movement was shifting from an essentially
offensive to a basically defensive posture. The Communist movement was under
attack. Efforts to develop a defensive strategy whereby the working class could
fight to protect the gains made in the 1930’s were therefore imperative.

The anti-revisionist movement failed to approach their situation
realistically and neglected to come up with tactics appropriate to reality. Many
of the expelled forces continued to talk abstractly about the struggle for
socialism and “revolutionary mass work” without any regard for the actual state
of the class struggle or the consciousness of the masses. In this way, they
further isolated themselves from the receding mass movements and put forward a
line and practice which in no way helped the working class in its retreat
prompted by the Cold War and the Taft-Hartley Act.

Then, as now, ultra-leftism preaches endlessly about revolutionary tactics
and the struggle for Communism in the complete absence of any analysis of the
state of the conjuncture, class forces and class consciousness. Then, as now,
ultra-leftism is more concerned with the purity of its own tactics then it is
with their effectiveness in bringing Communism to the working class.

Of course, these conclusions and criticisms apply with different weight to
different expelled groups. Nonetheless, they apply to the overall character of
the anti-revisionist movement, 1945-1950. As such, they constitute a grim
warning to our contemporary movement of the danger that remains as long as these
deviations are not defeated in our own theory and practice.

Endnotes

All statements made in the article are taken from these works
or are referred to in them. The definitive work on this subject will, no doubt,
correct many inaccuracies contained in the article. In the interests of space,
however, we have kept the footnotes to a minimum.

[12] William F. Dunne, The Struggle Against Opportunism in the Labor Movement, For a Socialist United States (New York Communication Committee,
n.d.).

[13] See the flyer An S.O.S. to All Communists from the P.R. Club,
CP., issued in October, 1946, and the article, “11 Rank-and-File Communists
Ousted by Party for Rebellion,” New York Times November 6, 1946.

[18] For a discussion of the current debate on the Communist
treatment of proletarian internationalism, see Paul Costello, “World Imperialism
and Marxist Theory: On the International Line of the Communist Movement,”
Theoretical Review, #9 (March-April, 1979).